Jul 28, 2021
tl;dr: A manga about a set of relationships that are both immensely sad and quite adorable that has interesting elements but needed to flesh them out more.
This is a manga set in a world where due to the effects of global warming and the resulting rise in sea levels and desertification, Japan has essentially collapsed. It breaks down into four nations, each of which are constantly fighting each other over natural resources as there is constant scarcity. Because the conflict is occurring over natural resources, it was decided that using heavy weaponry would be forbidden as that would likely destroy what was being fought over.
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As a result, all these battles are fought solely by foot soldiers. Most of these soldiers simply use modern day guns, but there are also special forces teams composed of what are known as Flower Maidens who essentially have the ability to control plants. These Flower Maidens are girls that have been infected by a certain flower that begins growing inside them. When the girls fall in love, the flower begins to sprout and they gain powers based on the level of love. However, as is the case with regular flowers, once the flower fully blooms it withers away, and thus these Flower Maidens have very limited life spans.
This manga focuses on a special forces team known as Floris composed of Flower Maidens and their partners who fight alongside them. Though them fighting is important, it’s basically just a foundation for showing the relationships that exist between the various couples in Floris and their associated development. There is some semblance of an overarching plot, but it doesn’t matter that much and what’s truly worth getting invested in in this manga is the relationships that various couples have. Thus, the more subdued portions focused solely on those relationships are just as important if not more important than the battles.
The general tone and atmosphere of the manga I would describe as dreary. It’s set in what is pretty much a post-apocalyptic world, but the Flower Maidens and their partners are insulated from that. After all, their powers are based on love, so it is in the militaries interests to nurture that and insulate them from the horrors of the world. Still, the state of the world can’t be completely ignored and the circumstances of the Flower Maidens themselves, being girls that have to fight and are destined not to live very long, is quite heavy. Thus, while there are no major dark events, there’s still a general sense of things being somewhat depressing and melancholy that permeates everything, including the light comedy and the fluffy romantic scenes which it has a good amount of. There’s action as well where the main cast is clearly killing scores of people, but their deaths really aren’t focused on that much, and thus don’t make the manga darker, though it does feel kind of strange. The action in and of itself also wasn’t that great, but had some interesting elements arising from the girl’s plant powers, and at least managed to support the more important parts of the narrative.
The main characters are the couple composed of the soldier Sawamura and the flower maiden Nadeko, though they’re only the focus in the first and last volumes with the middle two volumes instead having stories that focus on each of the other couples that are part of Floris. Sawamura’s character and background only gets fleshed out about as well as the other characters in Floris, and Nadeko’s character and background was fleshed out noticeably less than most of the rest of the cast strangely enough, which I thought was pretty strange. To be honest, I felt that both of them were dull compared to the rest of the cast. Their relationship is essentially what everything else is framed around, but in and of itself I thought it was one of the less interesting couplings in the manga. The themes primarily explored with Sawamura and Nadeko’s relationship are all centered around the more simplistic aspects of Flower Maidens and their relationships, which include things like fighting for the sake of love and it being better to die for love than live without feeling anything. Most of this felt pretty generic though and the relationship development felt really standard.
The stories of other couples I felt had more interesting dynamics and explored more interesting themes such as love that’s forced with the intention of filling a hole in one’s heart, a desire to improve and prove oneself for the sake of love, love being born from a mutual desire for revenge, and a willingness to fight and kill others for the sake of love even when they haven’t done anything wrong. Because this is a short manga and they’re not in the focus, none of these is explored in that much depth and overall their relationship didn’t feel as fleshed out as Sawamura and Nadeko’s which is somewhat disappointing, but it was still enough to get me invested in them equally to the relationship between the main couple. The Sawamura and Nadeko relationship is still solid enough as the foundation for everything else and has some great fluff and impactful moments that hit a lot of good emotional beats, especially the ending, but I felt it was all the other couples that really made the manga interesting. I felt that the ending did a decent job with everyone, though the ending in terms of everything that matters was immensely predictable essentially from the beginning of the manga, so this is very much a journey story and not an ending story.
As for some final general notes, I thought that the manga made good use of flower and plant related themes and imagery, but the art I felt was somewhat dull in style though and wasn’t all that great in terms of quality either. The official translation is also not that great, being pretty stiff and having a good amount of errors.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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